Sir, - Brian Hales is wrong to say (August 29th) that the "British people would vote to cede Northern Ireland to the Republic". A majority of people in Great Britain might want, for understandable financial reasons, to expel a million or so unionists in Ireland from the UK state, but in doing so they would be expelling those who consider themselves just as British as Mr Hales of Essex, or more so.
The Guardian poll is an enormous red herring latched on to by a na∩ve or desperate republican movement. There is no precedent for a state expelling loyal citizens. And as Prof Joe Lee put it in his monumental history, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, "partition now saved the South from the most explosive internal problems subverting new states, race and religion, by the simple device of exporting them to the North".
To coin a phrase, those issues haven't gone away: witness the problems the Republic is having in integrating a few thousand Nigerians who are desperate to stay.
Now that the silly season is nearly over, could we have a return to some political reality on both sides of our Irish Sea? There is not going to be a united Ireland in the foreseeable future. Period. - Yours, etc.,
Simon Partridge, East Finchley, London N2.1